TheNextWeb.com reported that a U.S. court has ruled that scraping data from a public website without permission is not illegal. This is going to prove to be a very interesting case on appeal as it could set a very interesting precedent.
From the article:
An appeals court situated in California, US, today said it’s not illegal to scrape data from public websites without any prior approval. Web scraping refers to the process of collecting large troves of data with the use of web crawlers – scripts designed to lift information from web pages.
The ruling comes after a legal dispute between LinkedIn and data analytics firm HiQ. LinkedIn sent a cease-and-desist letter to HiQ, demanding it to stop scraping the site. In response, the data analytics company counter-sued in hopes of blocking LinkedIn from interfering.